Intelligence: The Virtue That's MIA

By Dan Hagen

The four central virtues for the Stoics were intelligence, bravery, justice and self-control.

Note that Christianity simply ignores the first, and doesn't pay too much attention to the other three, either.

And that, I’m afraid, is the problem with the fundamentalists who form the so-called “Tea Party.”

These people are not developmentally disabled in intelligence. They are emotionally and intellectually self-blinded because they have surrounded themselves with a plutocratically puppeteered culture that devalues and even sneers at education, and because they surrender to puerile fears that encourage them to refuse to accept the adult responsibility of critical thinking.

During the 2008 election, for example, thanks to a relentless GOP propaganda campaign aimed at know-nothings, craven and wretched reporting and the general willful, thundering stupidity of the American public, what we were offered as "issues" were such topics as Hillary Clinton's capacity to sob, Barack Obama's middle name, the fear of his "secret Muslim religion," whether he and his wife indulge in "terrorist fist bumps," and his bowling score.

According to the corrupt corporate media and the clueless Tea Party, THIS was what the cretin voters in this country wanted to discuss while deregulated financial fraud collapsed the world economy.

If ignorance is slavery, then Fox News is a whole damn antebellum plantation.

"The mess in Washington!" "More bang for the buck!" Those are among the empty slogans screenwriter Budd Schulberg suggested could be used to easily fool ignorant Americans into voting for people who intended to harm them.

In 1957.

Self-destructive, willful ignorance is a venerable American tradition. A culture that despises education and intelligence has to relearn by the hard knocks of bloody conflict what it could have remembered by reading.

Americans don't reinvent the wheel, but their determined ignorance forces them to reinvent the revolution.
And yes, Texas Republicans have actually come out in opposition to critical thinking skills.

Playlist

The Ceaseless Buzz of the Digital Hive

The Eternal Question

Bachelor

A 1950 magazine illustration

Now there's a word you don't hear any more, for a variety of raised-eyebrow and pursed-lips reasons. 
Used to hear it all the time.

Self Control

Not one of mine, but I wish it were

The Dark Planet

By Dan Hagen

Don’t you find it strange?

American right wingers leap to the defense of a man who, against police instructions, chases an unarmed teenage boy and shoots him dead. They’re indifferent toward, even actively hostile to, poor people whom the federal government had abandoned to the tender mercies of hurricane Katrina.

They endorse torture. They admire flying robot bombs that blast civilian populations.

They indulge themselves in apocalyptic fantasies, the fever dreams of fundamentalist religion, and clearly relish that civilization-wrecking, mass-destructive horror, even playing video games about it.

Guys whose bookshelves are lined with their favorite political screeds, penned by Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly, march into Unitarian churches on a mission to slaughter “liberals.”

Their pundits, politicians and plutocrats “joke” about assassinating the president of the United States. Ha ha ha.

You can sense what’s going on here. Incessantly loud-mouthed though they are, the right wingers are still afraid to say some things out loud, and one of them is what they’re ginning themselves up to do. They’re groping for a handy, all-purpose justification to kill unarmed, innocent people.

We can all feel it out there, even though the American corporate media, marching lockstep to a Republican-set drumbeat, studiously pretends it isn’t there.

It’s like one of those gas giant dark planets, invisible but impressing itself upon us nevertheless with its tremendous gravitational pull, swinging closer.

Better watch the horizon. Watch the skies.